Why Freelance Designers Are Never Cheaper

When you compare freelance booth designers and design studios, the question of price seems to pop up first. A freelancer is cheaper, but whenever something is cheaper you still pay more – with your time, confidence, deadlines, reputation and risks. It doesn’t really matter how talented and inspired he is, what awesome projects he has performed and what experience he’s got. No one can guarantee what happens with your project tomorrow.

Dealing with a studio, on the other hand, is working with a company, a team of dedicated people. And the fact that they work together provides the client with multiple benefits.

Experience of the Team

Exchanging opinions and sharing insights is much easier within a team. In spheres like exhibition stand design, very few people are eager to teach their competitors something really useful during webinars. If you hire a team, you hire people who constantly develop their skills based not just on their own experience, but the experience of their colleagues. Studios usually attend professional events and exhibitions to get new sources of inspiration and to get to know the newest design trends. This means that your stand design will look professional and up-to-date.

Easy Payments

It is much easier and it feels more relaxed to have all your payments totally clear. If you work with an exhibition stand design studio you can have all the contracts and the invoices you may need. You don’t need to know how the escrow payments work on the freelance websites and how much commission fees will you lose for the chance to leave a horrible feedback to someone who lets you down.

Brand and Responsibility

Like with any other service, when you deal with a studio there is a brand, reputation, and credit. These things are hard to acquire but easy to lose. A studio will do its best to keep its reputation of a reliable partner, as it is the word of mouth that brings new people to its door.

Result Oriented Substitutions

People are way too fragile. They get sick, they lose inspiration, they have kids with runny noses and dogs that require urgent vaccinations. They also have unreliable Internet connection from time to time, but that doesn’t count here. When you order an exhibition booth design from a studio, you don’t care whose grandmother got into the hospital or whose cat ruined the cable. If anything (God forbid) happens to a designer responsible for your project his or her colleague will continue the work with the same pace, keeping up to all the deadlines.

Customer Relationship Management

A most common type of a CRM a freelancer uses is a pack of yellow post-it notes. A studio can afford a comprehensive CRM system and the newest project management software. What this means to you is that all your requests are taken into consideration and all the requirements are met.

Actual Multitasking

During a busy season, you may need to have a couple of booth designs made simultaneously. A freelance designer’s possibilities will be a bottleneck here – a guy (or a girl) simply can’t deliver a few projects at once. A studio can handle a number of projects at the same time without any delays.

Your Personal Project Manager

No offends, but creatives are the kind of people that need to be guided all the time. Which is why a reliable design studio will have a project manager who will make sure all your requirements are met and all your requests are fulfilled the way you need. Not to mention that unlike the creatives this person knows how to use a calendar and a clock so that your projects always meet the deadlines.

Always Available

A studio doesn’t go to the movies and doesn’t keep its phone in the quiet mode during the office hours. This means you can always ask your question or request a quotation or… You don’t have to believe us – check this statement and contact us right now.

3 Comments

I’m not trying to rock the boat, but this article seems to be somewhat of a misrepresentation of most independent designers.

No, we arent’ “cheaper”. Cheap is a word we would never describe ourselves as. In many cases may be less expensive, however, because most of us are efficient and use our time to our best advantage, and won’t turn out bad design with our name attached. I’ve seen shoddy work come from offices of one and offices of ten, so the “he’s a freelancer so he must not be that good” thought is anything but in most cases.

I’ve being independent for the past 10 years now, and I’ve seen largely organized and creative designers, as competitors sometimes and partners at other times, that were even MORE SO when they became independent and out on their own. Most come from the top exhibit houses we’ve all heard of, and worked with the largest and smallest name companies that go to shows. The independend designers I know found reasonable success at each studio, within each group, and are considered assets for the exhibit houses for which they do work.. They’ve learned the art of billing to get paid effectively and learned to budget their accounts to help them run their business more cost effectively and efficiently during short lean times. All of them have learned what potential clients expect to see, and most of them understand the concept of the budget. The majority of design business’ that you call “freelancing” are actually working 45-65 hour weeks with few empty slots(most often they have to make extra time to take on extra projects), and they’ve arrived at that point because their designs have a high ratio of selling to losing.

As much, I know a few designers that have been let go from design studios for lack of work, and that can only come from a loss of what was supposed to be projected ongoing work. often that comes from bad management, attitudes or losing designs…or a combination of all. Groups? For the end user they can be a good thing, but also be a false sense of security as well. We all know the dynamics of groups.

Accessibility to a designer is rarely an issue anymore with mobiles and email, and most of the time we have the on. add to that many independent designers work in a home office, we can’t escape AE’s/AM’s/PM’s/end users and are expected to work evenings and weekends, which we do. We all have backup plans, accessible files, others to save the day when we can’t be there. just like a doctor’s office. calls aren’t missed, deadlines all met, when promised, every time. There are those who don’t do all of these things, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater as they say.

“Why Freelance Designers Are Never Cheaper” no, we aren’t. who wants to be cheap? We can’t afford to be cheap, but we are less expensive for many. Judge the designer or office by what they turn out and sells, rather than by their label. Brands can be misleading.

We do not object to freelancing, as we ourselves had worked as freelancers for a few years before we organized our own studio. We know everything from the inside. We agree with you, there are many awesome freelance designers who deliver high-quality projects and who are responsible and punctual, and that’s cool. But most of freelance creatives have significant “get-the-job-done” problems, and you can’t argue about this. We had some quite bitter experience of work with certain freelancers and that triggered us to speak about it. We think that the company work leads to a better result and you don’t even have to stay at the same office for that. This is one of the new business models where a group of freelancers founds an online-company. But that is not freelance itself anymore, it’s about the business and the client relationship as B2B.